"caught between a Rock and a Hard Place" - Between Discourses of Empowerment and Solicitude: Danish Public Sector Service Professionals' Discourses of Nonattendance

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Nonattendance constitutes a profound challenge in public sector services targeting young adults with mental health difficulties. Therefore, researchers and practitioners are occupied with trying to resolve this. For clinicians to be aware of their own naturalized and perhaps inappropriate communicative practices, we investigated the established normative organizational logics behind explanations and strategies related to nonattendance. We performed a critical discourse analysis on material collected through participatory research throughout 2015. Three discourses were identified: solicitude, responsibility, and youth discourse. Although the discourses were complex and entangled, they were used by all practitioners. Furthermore, some of the discourses, especially the responsibility and the solicitude discourses, were inherently tension filled, and practitioners experienced frustration in dealing with these tensions. The youth discourse can be understood as a coping mechanism to deal with these tensions because it distributes responsibility for nonattendance to general social and cultural processes.

Original languageEnglish
JournalQualitative Health Research
Volume27
Issue number11
Pages (from-to)1686-1700
Number of pages15
ISSN1049-7323
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sep 2017

    Research areas

  • adaption, coping, enduring, adolescents, youth, young adults, behavior, caregivers, caretaking, collaborative research, communication, complexity, content analysis, culture of, discourse analysis, doctor-patient, nurse-patient, health behavior, health care, interprofessional, mental health and illness, power, empowerment, psychiatry, qualitative, quality of care, recovery, Scandinavia

ID: 245373438